The three large 19th-century European empires—Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia—all collapsed either during, or as a result of, World War I. New countries and altered boundaries emerged, often with different names or different spellings of geographical locations. Fortunately, finding aids for […]
Bibliography for Records of the Former Soviet Union
At the IAJGS conference in Los Angeles, July 2010, Professor Benjamin Nathans presented a report on the archives of the former Soviet Union. As part of his talk, Professor Nathans distributed the following list of sources. His book, Beyond the […]
Book Review: A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire: Revised Edition. 2 vols, by Alexander Beider.
Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire: Revised Edition. 2 vols, by Alexander Beider. Avotaynu, 2008. $118.00. To order: http://www.avotaynu.com/books/DJSRE2.htm When the first edition of Alexander Beider’s massive Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire came out in […]
The 1897 All-Empire Russian Census
The 1897 All-Empire Russian Census was the first and only census conducted in the Russian Empire prior to World War II. Its major interest and value both for personal genealogy and for the history of Jewish communities is that the […]
Jewish Surnames Adopted in Various Regions of the Russian Empire
This article is adapted from a lecture delivered at the IAJG Conference in Chicago, August 18, 2008—Ed. Generally speaking, it is relatively easy to distinguish Sephardic surnames from Ashkenazic surnames. For example, if one sees two lists, the […]
Bringing the “Great Terror” Home
Family stories had Mowshe (Morris) Rosenfeld coming from “Minsk, Pinsk, Russia.” As my research progressed, I learned from Morris’ ship’s passenger list that he had, in fact, come from a place called Turovo. Slownik Geograficzny Krolestwo Poliskich, the multi-volume, standard […]